


Oh Whiskey, If You Were a Woman

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-10 12:41:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19905874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Hilda knows Zelda’s tricks, but she’s not immune to them.





	1. Chapter 1

“Sister!” Zelda calls.

It sounds neutral enough. They’ve been neutral enough lately that Hilda doesn’t put her guard up, doesn’t flinch. Rising and turning, she says,

“The turnips! They’re marvelous this year!” 

It’s only then that she sees that tell-tale flame in Zelda’s eyes. She should’ve known better. She should’ve known Zelda wouldn’t seek her out in the garden except for this.

A hammerhead to her temple. A quick, efficient, painless death, at least. 

Then Darkness, a vastness unfathomable and weightless, a void so dark it’s almost light again. The blackest man-made black absorbs over ninety-nine percent of light. This black, though, absorbs and reflects much more than just photons. It creeps into a person, sucks out a person’s essence and spits it back out again in dizzying, nightmarish images and distortions. It is both nothing and everything. And so dark.

Then soft, caressing earth. 

It’s funny to Hilda that that should be the first thing she always registers. She’s friendly with a mortal woman who specializes in puff pastry for PTO bake sales who has taken to confiding in her about her night terrors. This woman always feels paralyzed and impotent in her dreams and then wakes in a start with her heart pounding furiously. She says she can feel it in each rib, must recite states and capitals to calm herself enough to even be able to move. But here Hilda is, actually dead. Actually paralyzed. Actually impotent. And when she wakes, resurrects, resuscitates, whatever, she’s so placid.

Soft, caressing earth—cool and tranquilly enveloping. It’s an embrace that isn’t an embrace, and as her neurons refire—languid at first but gaining momentum and strength—her toes curl, and she yawns and stretches into it.

A good death can be rejuvenating. A well-earned death, a foreseen death. But this one in particular is none of those things. She feels her body tingling as her revived heart pumps blood, limbs buzzing with fresh erythrocytes. When she knows why she’s been killed, she can enjoy the sensations. But when she doesn’t know, she’s immediately using her new, athletic neurons to rile herself up.

Maybe it had been the turnips, Hilda thinks. As far as root vegetables go, Zelda has always preferred beets. They’re obliquely sweet and deep red. Hearty and very good pickled. And above all, their juice stains vibrantly.

Hilda tries not to think of the parallels as she climbs out of her grave.

And—true to form when she doesn’t know the cause of her recent demise—isn’t it something that this should be her grave? A magical deposit for someone’s grievances ought to be community property, ought to be shared and passed off when anyone’s reached her absolute limit, but here it is hers exclusively. Because she’s the one to die and live again. She’s the one acted upon. Always. Somehow.

Hilda hauls herself out, fantasizing about arson and retaliation and agency. But it’s all as fake as her death.

As much as she might hate Zelda in certain moments, she’s eighty percent sure she could never work herself into enough of a froth as to commit that intimate of a murder. Killing someone is easy. Killing someone while absolutely knowing what she will go through at the doors of death and how she will feel upon resurrection is another matter entirely. She’s not sure if Zelda deserves the clarity afforded in a death like that.

Hilda’s cleaned herself up. She’s had a night’s natural rest—every time she's about to fall asleep she can’t help but think it’s a cheap approximation of death—and when she wakes again she’s never nearly as lucid as when she’s just circumvented a true grave. 

She’s in her usual flannel and cardigan, frying her usual eggs. She and Zelda are looking at each other across the breakfast table and pretending not to. Zelda repositions her newspaper, says smugly,

“How are you this morning, sister?”

“Fresh as a daisy,” Hilda says, but there’s an edge to her voice that has both Ambrose and Sabrina looking at her suspiciously. “How are you, love?” Hilda counters with conspicuous ice.

Zelda looks at Hilda, takes her in hair part to ballet flat. She huffs:

“Been better.”

“Oh?” Hilda says.

Zelda flops the newspaper onto the table melodramatically as they continue looking at each other.

Ambrose says,

“Mr. Gunderson isn’t going to embalm himself,” as he disappears embarrassedly down the stairs.

Sabrina looks frantically toward where Ambrose has retreated and her own bookbag and the door, says,

“Extra tutoring in excel spreadsheets this morning!” She grabs her bag and lunch and hastens away.

Hilda and Zelda are left looking at each other over the table. Hilda turns off the burner, pierces Zelda with her gaze.

“You’ve been better, have you?” Hilda says. “When, exactly? When you were killing me in front of Edward? For clout and because it was expected? Hmm? When you were fucking me in Paris? Because you couldn’t help yourself but to help yourself to my body? Hmm? When you were dicking off in Austin while I was here taking care of our dying parents? Hmm?”

Zelda scowls, huffs, rounds the table, stands right in front of Hilda.

“You know it’s never been as simple as you’re trying to make it,” Zelda husks. Hilda laughs into Zelda’s very close mouth.

“Zelds. I’m the one who’s had to die for it. Why shouldn’t I simplify where I can?”

Zelda pushes Hilda’s shoulders so that Hilda is perched on the kitchen sink. Zelda takes a step back. She admires her handiwork as much as she is shamed by it. Zelda drinks in Hilda perched on the sink. And then she remembers two nights previous, Sabrina unwilling and Hilda encouraging that unwillingness. 

“You’ve had to die for it because you deserved it,” Zelda says.

Dark baptisms are dark baptisms. They are what they are—giving oneself to the Dark Lord, dying to oneself and re-emerging a new dark creature. Zelda supposes dying and resurrecting in the Cain pit is very much the same. She almost envies Hilda for the imagined closeness to Satan himself.

“Sister,” Hilda says suddenly.

“What?” Zelda says.

They’re pressed against each other in the kitchen, bodies touching, breaths mingling, thighs entangling.

“Don’t you remember when you used to not kill me?” Hilda says.

“Barely,” Zelda says.

Zelda’s caught up with ideas and theology.

Hilda is hung up on different hang ups.

Hilda is draped over the sink, and she leans back, sighs, says,

“Oh Zelds. I remember when you couldn’t get enough of me.”

Zelda meets her where she is.

“But we’ve got different responsibilities now,” Zelda pants. “A reprobate nephew. A half-breed niece. It’s too much.”

“It’s not enough for you not to kill me,” Hilda says. Zelda scoffs, says,

“You discouraged our niece, aired your own arson fantasies.”

“You were listening.”

“Of course I was,” Zelda says. “I always listen when you talk.”

“But do you listen when I don’t talk?” Hilda says.

Zelda descends, encompasses. Her mouth is on Hilda’s neck.

“I’m always listening,” Zelda says. “Whether you like it or not.”


	2. Chapter 2

The last time.

They hadn’t known it’d be the last time, couldn’t have known. But it had been, regardless.

Hilda was weeding the garden. She was in overalls a half-size too small, her ample breasts spilling over the bib, her quadriceps and hamstrings straining against the starched denim. Zelda scanned the scene. She didn’t care about shallots, leeks, or chives. She cared only about how Hilda looked on her hands and knees.

“Sister!” Zelda called. It sounded neutral enough.

“I’m busy,” Hilda said. She meant it, but still she arched her back, flexed as she ministered to her various onions.

“I can wait,” Zelda said. “But not for long.”

At that, Hilda looked over her shoulder. And she saw Zelda’s eyes. She saw Zelda’s raw need.

“Make me a drink?” Hilda said. Zelda nodded and retreated.

Hilda turned back to the onions, finished weeding them on autopilot. The whole time she was thinking about what Zelda might be thinking of doing to her.

Hilda took off her boots at the threshold of the home they shared with their remaining brother—both parents and another brother were already dead, and now here they were together, scraping by. Her sodden socks were deposited in those same boots, and she entered silently.

At the parlor door, she unclasped a shoulder strap of her overalls, and Zelda—standing at the wet bar with a half-drunk tumbler of whiskey—watched her do so. Hilda unclasped the other shoulder strap and pulled the denim down and down. Zelda was drinking and watching.

“Oh, sister,” Zelda said around the lip of her double-old-fashioned glass.

“Yes?” Hilda said.

Hilda knew this is what Zelda wanted. Hilda knew this was what she wanted, too.

“Whiskey and soda?” Zelda said.

“Of course,” Hilda said. She draped her overalls over the piano bench and then draped herself over the settee in her panties and rolled-sleeves chambray. She watched Zelda at the bar, clinking ice and fiddling with co2 hoses but mostly watching her.

Hilda lifted her legs so Zelda could slide in, could sit and wrap a forearm around Hilda’s naked calves and encourage them onto her lap, could lean over Hilda’s reclining body and deposit a tumbler into her waiting hand.

They drank, then.

“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Zelda said finally.

“And what about me?” Hilda said.

“I think you know,” Zelda said. She downed the rest of her drink and set the empty glass on the lampstand. Then both hands were free to skim along Hilda’s gastrocnemii and fibulas and tibias.

Hilda spread her legs a little, allowing, indulging, enjoying.

“But I’d rather you tell me,” Hilda said.

Zelda’s hands moved silkily up to the underside of Hilda’s knees, caressed and then pressed in in such a way as to force Hilda to bend.

“You know I’m not particularly vocal,” Zelda said as she turned and climbed atop her sister, fitting perfectly between those raised knees. Hilda set her half-drunk glass on the coffee table so she could grasp Zelda’s hair with both hands.

“Well,” Hilda said. “You don’t like to talk. But you do like to moan.”

Hilda dragged Zelda up to her, kissed her. Zelda kissed back, tongue and teeth, and then she pulled back.

“I don’t actually like to do either. But you make me do both.”

Hilda’s mouth found the sensitive spot beneath Zelda’s ear. Zelda was moaning and bucking into her. Hilda laved there and then whispered,

“You don’t like it? Really?”

“You’re a tease,” Zelda gasped.

“A tease promises pleasures she won’t grant. I, on the other hand—”

Zelda’s index finger entered Hilda, and Hilda sighed. Zelda’s hips chased her hand.

“So you’re not a tease,” Zelda said. “What are you, then?”

“Just yours,” Hilda panted.

Zelda added a finger, thrust more forcefully. Hilda groaned, shut her eyes tightly, saw not just stars but constellations—Orion? Scorpio?—she didn’t know and didn’t care. She hooked her ankles around Zelda’s legs and drew her in, thrust her hips and drew her in.

“Just yours,” Hilda shouted. And Zelda added another finger, harder and harder still.

Zelda kissed her, a phantasmagoria that Hilda couldn’t exactly comprehend. She could catch a tongue here, an aggression there, teeth in between.

Hilda rode it out, clenching and yearning. Hilda rode it out, knowing this was what Zelda wanted and knowing it was she herself wanted besides.

“Fuck, Hilda. Don’t tempt me in the garden like that,” Zelda said, breathless.

“My overalls were that enticing?” Hilda said.

They looked at each other.

“Anything you wear is enticing to me,” Zelda said.

xxx

It was the last time. They didn’t know it. Maybe they would’ve cherished it. Maybe they wouldn’t have. But it had been the last time, regardless.


End file.
